“Oil has become
the elephant in the room,” Linda McQuaig wrote in It’s
the Crude, Dude: Greed, Gas, War and the American Way. Turns out it’s
the Canadian way as well. As Toronto Centre NDP candidate, McQuaig stated a
simple fact on CBC’s Power and Politics: “a
lot of people recognize that a lot of the oilsands oil may have to stay in the
ground if we’re going to meet our climate change targets.”
As punishment
for speaking the truth, McQuaig is now the target of corporate power. Calgary
Conservative MP Michelle Rempel immediately jumped on the remark, accusing
McQuaig of having an “ideological aversion” to tar sands and opposing workers
in the energy sector. Alberta Opposition Leader Brian Jean labeled McQuaig’s
remarks “anti-Alberta posturing” and called on Premier Rachel Notley to
“actively repudiate this crazy idea in the strongest terms possible.” Presiding
over his second recession, Harper warned that it’s the NDP who would “wreck
this economy.” The corporate media are calling McQuaig’s remarks a “flap” that
the NDP need to exert “damage control” to repair. God forbid a journalist and
candidate raise in the mildest terms a basic scientific fact concerning the
most pressing issue of our generation, in the hopes that an election could
affect change.
Ideology vs science
McQuaig wrote It’s the Crude, Dude in the wake of the
Iraq War, to bring awareness to the dangers of climate change and the way the
oil industry influences politics. Quoting a 2003 report from the
Pentagon—hardly a bastion of left-wing ideology—she wrote: “There’s been a
tendency to regard global warming as a problem that will set in gradually,
giving the world a chance to adapt and even possibly take advantage of what
could be longer growing seasons. ‘This view of climate change may be a
dangerous act of self-deception, as increasingly we are [already] facing
weather-related disasters,’ the report states. ‘Rather than decades or even
centuries of gradual warming, recent evidence suggests the possibility that a
more dire climate scenario may actually be unfolding.’”
A decade later, Harper
finally has the Iraq War he always wanted and climate change is even more
of a clear and present danger—from wildfires on the west coast to record
temperatures in the Middle East. But the corporate-backed Conservatives and
Liberals have an ideological aversion to science, which calls for limiting
climate change to 2 degrees to avoid catastrophic change. “Nearly all politicians
across the world would like to develop all domestic sources of oil and gas and
coal that they have and also search for new resources. What this analysis shows
is that those two positions are inconsistent. Every country can’t exploit all
of their domestic reserves and keep to two degrees,” explained Christophe
McGlade of the University College London. His report in the journal Nature this year showed that 85%
of tar sands have to be left in the ground.
“This would
seem, by any meaningful standard, to be a problem worthy of serious attention
at the very highest levels. But, oddly, it’s a problem that is largely
unacknowledged in official quarters,” McQuaig wrote a decade ago about US
politicians refusing to face reality about oil politics, and fabricating terror threats to distract from the climate crisis: “Our wanton over-consumption of oil might be about to
create a whole new kind of terror in our lives. Yet the Bush administration,
which had consistently ignored and downplayed the threat of climate change and
done its best to sabotage the international Kyoto accord aimed at dealing with
the problem, was not about to change horses in its ‘war on terror.’ Its defense
strategy would remain fixated on shadowy men in long-flowing robes, not on ones
wearing business suits and bearing large checks made out to the Republican
Party.” Harper is continuing the Bush legacy—stoking Islamophobia to justify
wars abroad and attacks on civil liberties at home, while fueling the climate
crisis.
Anti-Alberta?
It is not
“anti-Alberta” to question the tar sands; the tar sands themselves are anti-Alberta, undermining the traditional territories and the communities in what is
called Alberta. As McQuaig wrote a decade ago, “Getting the oil out of the tar
is a horrendous task; it involves a massive, high-tech operation that causes
serious environmental damage…By any logic, then, most of that tar sands oil
should be left in the ground.”
Harper has tried
to undermine this logic by making people in Alberta so dependent on the tar
sands that they put the profits of Big Oil ahead of their own lives. When the
price of oil fell, the only solution the Conservatives offered was to slash public
services to balance the budget, but Notley’s election was a rejection of this
blackmail. The Conservatives are trying to undo the provincial election and win
the federal election—attacking Notley at the start of the campaign and now
demanding she attack McQuaig.
But what we need
to actively repudiate in the strongest possible terms is not a debate on the
tar sands but the tar sands themselves. As Melina
Laboucan-Massimo from the Lubicon Cree First Nation said at the March for
Jobs, Justice and the Climate: “What I have seen is immense changes to the
land, to the air, to the climate, to the water, to the people, and to the
animals. Where I come from, until my generation my family was able to live
sustainably off the land. And it becomes harder and harder to do that. People
and animals are sick and dying. And now across the tar sands we are surrounded
by operations across Northern Alberta. We have also seen immense oil spills
like the one that happened near my family, just a few miles away. It was one of
the biggest oil spills in Alberta’s history in 2011… What we need now today, is
Canada needs to accelerate the transition from destructive climate polluting
sources like the tar sands and build a green, just economy that many of our
communities so desperately want and need now…Even in the heart of the tar sands
we can build a different kind of economy, with clean energy and green jobs,
without compromising our families and our communities.”
Jobs, justice and the climate
Harper has been
silent while the economic crisis destroyed 400,000
manufacturing jobs, and stood by while the drop in oil prices led to
thousands of further layoffs in the oil industry. But now the Conservatives are
attacking McQuaig and the NDP for being anti-worker.
What the climate
justice movement has made clear is that the choice between the environment and
jobs is “fear-mongering at its worst,” in the words of Jerry Dias, president of
Unifor. As the union representing thousands of workers in the oil and gas
industry, Unifor is a signatory of the Solidarity
Accord against the Northern Gateway pipeline and was a major participant in
the recent March
for Jobs, Justice and the Climate.
As the report by
Blue-Green Canada makes clear, the $1.3 billion in subsidies to the oil and gas
industry could instead create 18,000 more jobs in
renewable energy and energy efficiency. From the UK to South Africa, there are campaigns for a
million climate jobs, to solve the economic and climate crises, and now these
demands have spread to Canada.
For $4.65 billion (less than half what Harper recently gave to the military),
we could create 92,000
jobs in wind, solar, geothermal and tidal power. For $25 billion (less than
half what Harper gave in corporate tax cuts) we could create a high-speed rail
network could create 100,000
jobs and reduce our dependence on oil. And $1 billion on a home
and building retrofit program (the amount Harper spent attacking civil
liberties at the G20 protest) could leverage $50 billion to create a million
jobs that would reduce carbon emissions.
Damage control
In order to control
the damage done to the planet and its people we need to leave the oil in the
soil, respect First Nations and create a million climate jobs. Unfortunately
climate justice was largely absent from the first leaders debate, which instead
displayed unanimity on tar sands expansion—with only minor differences on which
pipelines should transport it, or where it should be refined. Both the Green
Party and the NDP have advocated more domestic refining, while Mulcair supports
west-east pipelines and calls for “objective reviews”—as if the increasingly
dire climate science and the lived experience of Indigenous communities is not
objective.
As the upcoming Toxic Tour in
Aamjiwnaang First Nation makes clear, domestic refining and alternate
pipelines are no solution: “In Aamjiwnaang everything is polluted air, soil,
water, and people. Some of the land Industry has now made their empire on is
stolen land or ongoing projects that have little to no consent. This is a
prime land for industry because it is used to refine and export. The colonial
fight against industry has left indigenous communities like Aamjiwnaang in a
constant daily struggle.” This daily struggle by Indigenous communities most
affected by the climate crisis is leading a rising climate justice movement: 25,000 marched in Quebec City in April to Act
on Climate and 10,000 marched in Toronto last month for Jobs, Justice and the Climate.
The climate justice movement deserves a voice this election, but the corporate
parties and the corporate press are calling on the NDP to repudiate the
slightest comment that echoes these movements. The same development happened in
the BC provincial election,
where NDP comments against the Kinder-Morgan pipeline were said to be the cause
of their defeat. But after the election, opposition to Kinder Morgan exploded—showing
the NDP’s electoral loss was not because of its timid opposition but because
they didn’t go far enough in outlining bold alternatives. If the NDP leadership
see statements against tar sands as more damaging than the tar sands
themselves, they will sever themselves from the climate justice movement and
provide no alternative at the ballot box. Instead they should defend McQuaig
for helping spark a real debate this election, spend the next two months repudiating in the strongest terms the Conservatives’ and Liberals’ ideologically-driven wrecking
of the climate, and be a megaphone for the climate justice movement that is
trying to control the damage and promote alternatives.
